Genetic scientists in commercial row over 'book of life'

By Roger Highfield

12:00AM GMT 15 Feb 2001

THE shaky truce between rival teams of genetic scientists was abandoned last week as the publicly funded Human Genome Project launched a blistering attack on its commercial rivals for allegedly attempting to "privatise" the "book of life".

Sir John Sulston, the head of Britain's public effort that read one third of the human genetic code, launched his strongest attack yet on attempts to privatise our genetic inheritance. "Others want to charge the rest of the human race a fortune to read our own genetic code, but we're here to tell them that the human genome is not for sale."

The head of the company which produced the rival version of the Genome denied that access to its discoveries would be restricted. But Dr Craig Venter of Celera Genomics said they would take steps to stop the information being used by rival companies for commercial gain.

Sir John doubted that the private effort led by Celera in Rockville, Maryland, would have succeeded without having access to the genetic information released each day by his group and those of 20 teams worldwide. And even if Celera had completed the project alone, Sir John said commercial restrictions on the use of its data would have severely inhibited research into human genes, which ultimately could lead to a wealth of new diagnostic methods and treatments.

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The first analysis of the human genetic code by the rival teams, published this week in the journals Science and Nature, reveals an extraordinary range of information about human origins, evolution and medicine that will pave the way to personalised medicine.

"It is about the future of all life. It is information relevant to us all and must be used for the benefit of all," said Sir John, former director of the Sanger Centre near Cambridge. As one example, he said that the public data, described in the journal Nature, had already been used to find more than 30 genes, most notably one linked with the development of breast cancer.

Sir John said that his commercial rivals invited the United States at that time to shut down the public sequencing effort. Fortunately, this led to a boost in funding for the public effort, notably from the Wellcome Trust. Thanks to the public project, the data is in the public domain. "That is what we are celebrating today. Freedom. Freedom of information. Freedom of access. Free for all, for the hundreds of thousands of individual scientists, men and women on every continent."

Data from the public genome project, available to the world free of charge, is now used by scientists in more than 100 countries around the world to search for new medical treatments. During the past two months the public genome databases have been used 160,000 times by scientists in India, 61,000 times in Mexico and 50,000 in both China and Brazil.

In contrast, recent reports show that the private database of Celera Genomics is used by fewer than 50 subscribing organisations. Dr Venter defended his company's handling of the sequence and its publication in Science. He also denied that their information was being restricted, releasing it last week on the internet. "Our data is freely available to scientists anywhere," said Prof Venter. "There are no restrictions on the discoveries or the patentability or the publication of it."